The present invention relates to a method for controlling a base station, used in a cellular radio system employing TDMA multiple access method and comprising terminals, sectors and at least one base station which transmits one or more carriers, and which comprises a number of baseband parts, and at least one transmitter/receiver unit, and which is connected to the rest of the system by a digital transmission line in which information is transmitted in timeslots.
Prior art knows a Base Transceiver Station (i.e. BTS) of a cellular radio system, which transmits data to the radio path and which receives data from the radio path. The data stream received from the transmission path at the base station has been divided into frames that comprise timeslots. The timeslots comprise, in digital form, data contained by the different channels. The data in the timeslots of the frame have been processed in a suitable way at the base station, and the processed data have been allocated via the base station sections to subscriber terminals located in different parts in a sector of a cell in the cellular radio system. In the known solutions, channel allocation to different carriers and sectors has been determined by fixed timeslot allocation settings.
It has not, however, been easy to change the allocation settings of channels received at the base station because the allocation settings have been fixed. As a consequence of the difficult changing of the allocation settings, it has not been possible to utilize the transmission path capacity efficiently or flexibly enough. What was set forth above means that the data equipments on the transmission path have not met quickly or efficiently enough the requirements of other equipments using the transmission path. Allocation of channels into different sectors in the prior art required changing the allocation settings of transmission equipments in the base station, which was difficult and slow because the settings had to be changed manually. It was necessary to allocate timeslots from the transmission equipments even though the base station at that moment was not able to utilize the allocated timeslots. The costs have been added to by the requirement to allocate a lot of capacity in a base station in order to take into account that the network is at times loaded heavily and unevenly. It has, however, proved to be difficult to change the channel configuration of the network so that the network would operate flexibly under all loads.